A Book of Lives

By Edwin Morgan

Containing poems written by Edwin Morgan during the past six years, this collection looks at human life from a variety of perspectives, encompassing a range of themes, the foremost of which is history. This new work displays the author'scharacteristic willingness to experimentwith a variety of subjects, from the history of cancer to the new Scottish parliament.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781847778239

Edwin Morgan

Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) was born in Glasgow. He served with the RAMC in the Middle East during World War II. He became lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow, where he had studied, and retired as titular Professor in 1980. He was Glasgow's first Poet Laureate and from 2004 until 2010 served as Scotland's first Makar, or National Poet. He was made an OBE in 1982 and received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2000. A Book of Lives (2007) won the Scottish Arts Council Sundial Book of the Year. Carcanet has published most of his work, including his Collected Poems, Collected Translations, plays such as A.D.: A Trilogy of Plays on the Life of Jesus Christ and The Play of Gilgamesh and his translations of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac and Racine's Phaedra.

Book preview

Acknowledge the Unacknowledged Legislators!

Go on, squawk at the font, you chubby Scotty.

You have a long song ahead of you, do you know that?

Of course not, but you let the ghost of a chuckle

Emerge and flicker as if you had thrown

Your very first chuckle and the water was playful.

It will be, and gurly too, and full of dread

Once you are grown and reckoning ahead.

So squeal a little, kick a little, what’s a few drops

On that truly enormous human brow.

Man is chelovek, the Russians say,

The one with a forehead, the one with forethought,

The one whose mumbling and chuntering will not do,

Who knows it will not do, who lolls or bounces

Half-formed but strains for form, to be a child

And not a bundle! The bungler, the mumbler

Takes the deepest breath we are allowed,

Whistles the horizon’s dawn right down

Across the book of earth, audits the figures,

Tongue and teeth and lips in line, near-perfect,

Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord, the poet

Has hooked one leg over his simple chair-arm,

Sometimes tapping the beat upon his snuff-box,

Sometimes singing an old and well-loved air

To startlingly original effect.

He’ll print it too! Won’t it be in a book?

An open mind is proper in this case.

It’s only poetry, after all. Someone –

I can’t remember thousands of scribbling names –

Has said ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’

I find that slightly fundamentalist.

Yes, but do I go along with it?

I do not go along with it. No, I don’t.

Do I protest too much? Probably!

Think of what I said about the child.

He is a man now, let us talk to him.

Ask him how far he thinks his birkie

Registers on a Richter scale of insult.

He’s dead? Well, get a good dictionary.

Talk’s the thing. Dialogue’s the thing.

If any parliamentarian should be so remiss

As to think writers are interchangeable,

Or stupid, or irrelevant, or poor doomy creatures,

Punishments may have to be devised,

I say may, we want to persuade, not scold.

What is it but language that clamps

A country to glory? Ikons, concertos,

Pietàs, gamelans, gondolas, didgeridoos,

Luboks, a brace of well-tuned sleigh-bells –

These are very fine, of course they are.

But better still, always far better still

Is the sparkling articulacy of the word,

The scrubbed round table where poet and legislator

Are plugged in to the future of the race,

Guardians of whatever is the case.

The Cost of Pearls

Do you want to challenge that dervish Scotland?

Even and only being interrogated

by a swash of centenarian mussels

black-encrusted and crusty with it?

When they folded their arms and gave such a click

it could be heard right down Strathspey,

did you reckon the risk of a dialogue was minimal?

‘Come on then, have at you!’ It was like an old play

though far from funny. ‘All that winking stuff,

that metal, those blades,

you think we don’t know death when we smell it?’

‘Your nose deceives you. We are observers, explorers.

We heard there was a murmuring of mussels,

a clatter and a chatter

somewhere in the gravel-beds of unbonny Scotland,

almost like voices threatening something – ’

‘Damn sure we were threatening something! Do you know

a thousand of us were killed in one day

not long ago – ’ ‘I heard it was eight hundred – ’

‘Eight hundred, ten hundred, it was a massacre.

Your pearl poachers breenged through our domains like demons

with their great gully knives and scythed us to shreds

for what might be, most likely might not be,

a pearl, a pearl of price, a jeweller’s price.

I hear a shuffling of papers. Prepare yourself.

We are our wisest, neither clique nor claque

but full conclave. We want to know,

and we will know, what is it gives you

your mania for killing. Don’t interrupt!

For a few smouldering prettinesses

at neck and brow you would ransack

a species. I said don’t interrupt,

we have all the time in the world

and I can hear the steady footfall

(that’s a joke, you may smile)

as our oldest and wisest, worthily High Mussel

at a hundred and forty-nine, filtering and harrumphing

(no, you must not smile now),

angrily kicking the gravel, and with a last sift and puff

(no no, this is not funny, think of his powers)

commands the interrogation to begin.’

Lines for Wallace

Is it not better to forget?

It is better not to forget.

Betrayal not to be forgotten,

Vindictiveness not to be forgotten,

Triumphalism not to be forgotten.

Body parts displayed

At different points of the compass,

Between hanging and hacking

The worst, the disembowelling.

Blood raised in him, fervent

Blood raced in him, fervent

Blood razed in him, for ever

Fervent in its death.

For Burns was right to see

It was not only on the field

That Scots would follow this man

With blades and war-horn

Sharp and shrill

But with brains and books

Where the idea of liberty

Is impregnated and impregnates.

Oh that too is sharp and shrill

And some cannot stand it

And some would not allow it

And some would rather die

For the regulated music

Of Zamyatin’s Polyhymnia

Where nothing can go wrong.

Cinema sophisticates

Fizzed with disgust at the crudities

Braveheart held out to them.

Over the cheeks of some

(Were they less sophisticated?)

A tear slipped unbidden.

Oh yes it did. I saw it.

The power of Wallace

Cuts through art

But art calls attention to it

Badly or well.

In your room, in the street,

Even my god if it came to it

On a battlefield,

Think about it,

Remember him.

The Battle of Bannockburn

A Translation of ‘Metrum de Praelio Apud Bannockburn’, by Robert Baston

Pain is my refrain, pain comes dragging its rough train.

Laughter I disdain, or my elegy would be in vain.

The Ruler of All, who can cause tears to stall,

Is the true witness to call if you want any good to befall

Those under thrall, roped-up in filthy unsilky pall.

I weep for all that fall in that iron funeral.

I raise my battle-lament, sitting here in my tent.

And the blame for this event? God knows to whom it is sent!

This is a double realm: each itches to dominate:

Neither hands over the helm for the other to subjugate.

England and Scotland – which one is the Pharisee?

Each has to stand guard, and not fall into the sea!

Hence those pumped-up factions dyed with crimson blood,

Squads in battle-actions slaughtered crying in the mud,

Hence this waste of men, crossed out by war’s black pen,

Whole peoples sunk in the fen, still fighting, again and again,

Hence white faces in the ground, hence white faces of the drowned,

Hence huge grief is found, cries with which the stars are crowned,

Hence wars that devastate field and farm and state.

How can I relate each massacre that lies in wait?

It is June Thirteen Fourteen, and here I set the scene,

The Baptist’s head on a tureen, the battle on Stirling green.

Oh I am not glued to ancient schism and feud,

But my weeping is renewed for the dead I saw and rued.

Who

Reviews for A Book of Lives

[mikefarquhar · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

And I also read through Edwin Morgan's new collection of poetry A Book of Lives today as well, though I expect I will be returning to dip in and out of it again for the next wee while (it's cos I knew the new volume was coming out that I've been rereading some of the older ones recently). I've read about half of the poems collected in here before, but there is the usual mix from Morgan, who easily proves again why he is one of my favourite poets.